Hearth Of A Nation

A Delhi basement houses a shrine to the feeling of Indianness / Arts.

- Alex Traub

Down in a basement, on a lane in south Delhi, lie manuscripts by the most renowned writers of modern Indian history: Tagore, Faiz, Manto. They are accompanied by paintings and sketches, which also come from the sort of figures known by a single name: Souza, Raza. Then there are documents autographed by political leaders, including Jinnah and Nehru.

This hidden pantheon aims at comprehensiveness, but it also elicits surprise. A signature by the former prime minister VP Singh is accompanied by an abstract drawing of Ganesha. The physicist CV Raman adds to his signature a credo: “Light reveals the hidden soul of truth!” And Amartya Sen’s signature is featured alongside an unattributed caricature seemingly not available online—suggesting it might be a self-portrait.

The man who collected all these singular bibelots, Satnam Singh Hitkari—a former commissioner of India’s income tax department—hoped to establish “the first exclusive Literary Museum in the world,” as he wrote in Immortals of Literature, one of at least six books he self-published. The National Museum, the Crafts Museum and a number of international institutions borrowed from his collection. But the Sahitya Akademi, the government body dedicated to promoting literature, did not acquire his holdings and make them the centrepiece of “an institution of great national significance,” as he had hoped.

Satnam and, after he died in 2008, his son, Jai Singh Hitkari, transformed their basement into something less prominent but more intriguing than that original vision. Walk to the side entrance of the Hitkari home, go down the stairs, and you encounter a profusion of corkboards, manuscripts, pamphlets, works of art, and stray objets d’art such as antique handguns—an organised selection from the astonishing array of things Satnam collected over the course of his life.